A Land Far Away

Do dragons shed their skins?

Draconomicon, there is way too much goofy anatomical knowledge in it (this fluff from page 7, there's many more paragraphs about scales, I kid you not). Forgive the formatting, cut and paste from PDFs is dicey stuff.

A dragon’s scales grow throughout its lifetime, albeit very slowly. Unlike most other scaled creatures, a dragon neither sheds its skin nor sheds individual scales. Instead, its individual scales grow larger, and it also grows new scales as its body gets bigger. Over the years, a scale may weather and crack near the edges, but its slow growth usually proves sufficient to replace any portion that breaks off. Dragons occasionally lose scales, especially if they become badly damaged. Old scales often litter the floors of long-occupied dragon lairs.
When a dragon loses a scale, it usually grows a new one in its place. The new scale tends to be smaller than its neighbors and usually thinner and weaker as well. This phenomenon is what gives rise to bards’ tales about chinks in a
dragon’s armor. These tales are true as far as they go, but one new scale on a dragon’s massive body seldom leaves the dragon particularly vulnerable to attack.

And Council of Wyrms says the opposite, that they shed at every age category and give the scales to their faithful mooks to make armor!

Oh D&D, you so crazy.



But yeah, Draconomicon has a much stronger case for inclusion into Forgotten Realms than Council of Wyrms (correct edition and a stronger attempt at setting neutrality come to mind), though Forgotten Realms doesn't explicitly include the book, so we're not necessarily beholden to it.

ounds to me as if Dragons can shed on will. They're all little Britneys, grooming their hair to look dashing.

So 1994 AD&D Council of Wyrms speaks to it differently than 2003 3.0 Draconomicon. Didn't know, that is funny stuff. You so crazy indeed. *caps demihuman levels and prevents elf-rezzes for our AD&D re-creation*

We do rely on Draconomicon for our special materials somewhat, although we seem to have local "Dragon Hide and Dragon Scale" confusion, when the better of those two is really all about "Dragoncraft" per the Draconomicon.

Doesn't the monster manual give us rules for dragon hide/scale as a special material?

Had thought that core rules beat splatbooks on any given conflict here.



Also, yeah; Council of Wyrms did pretty terribly on the market, and wasn't adapted for 3.0/3.5 (except insofar as it had a pretty clear influence on the rules for aerial combat in 3.0/3.5): the premise of the book was, after all, trying to explore dragons as player characters, and the game just can't handle that well. Hence the publication date that aligns with 2e, and its current status in "what do we do with this?" limbo (kinda like Kara Tur in that regard).


But I would note that many of our players still hold that elf raise stuff as canon, and there is crude language and vitriol whenever the topic comes up.

The core rules aren't overridden, they're added to with another class of dragon-y items above and beyond Dragonhide, which per core is pretty boring stuff.

Book says it better than me (and it's all gated by a special feat too):

***
Armorsmiths can work with dragon hides to produce masterwork
armor or shields for the normal cost (see Special Materials,
page 283 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide). The armor
created has no special properties other than its masterwork
quality. (An armorsmith who also has the Dragoncrafter feat
can imbue even greater powers into the armor created; see
Dragoncraft Items, below.)

***

The dragoncraft junk includes armor, but is more than just armor. Armors for instance could have DR 5 vs. whatever energy fit the dead dragon's breath weapon. Like Dragoncraft Red Dragon Armor (dr 5 fire). However you could end up chugging a vial of Bronze Dragon blood for waterbreathing or Green Dragon blood for suggestion spells... without a Dragoncraft feat guy in the middle, you'd probably just barf your guts out and feel gross, it'd just be plain old blood, without being transformed via the crafting process. It's a skill driven process (Craft Alchemy comes into the blood example, Craft Armorsmithing comes into the armor example), for what that's worth, the end result is not itself magical, providing what I suppose must be extraordinary effects instead.

So... back to Curm's point, whether an entire "molted" bunch of scales got found, or "a few scattered scales in a lair" or "all the scales of a big dead dragon were available", you could with a regular armorer make boring dragon hide armor, bigger the dragon the heavier the potential for armor. With a "Dragoncraft" type guy, a feat we don't have in ALFA, you could have a guy trying to do all kinds of skill stuff to refine their blood or make weapons from their bones or whatever. So I don't see much of a conflict.